Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Side-effects of war
Consequences of war on civilians
Consequences of war on civilians
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Side-effects of war
After the characters become prisms reflecting the light of veracity, the reader cannot help but believe that none of them deserve the grim fates that befell them. When Curt Lemon stepped on the rigged explosive round and subsequently died, O’Brien poetically described the event by writing, “Sharp gray eyes, lean and narrow-waisted, and when he died it was almost beautiful, the way the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms,” (O’Brien 67). Expectedly, though, it takes O’Brien less than fifteen pages to provide the reader with another description of the incident: “I remember pieces of skin and something wet and yellow that must’ve been the intestines. The gore was horrible, …show more content…
and stays with me. But what wakes me up twenty years later is Dave Jensen singing ‘Lemon Tree’ as we threw down the parts,” (O’Brien 79). Even though the first description is much more appealing, the second description is certainly easier to believe, especially when considering O'Brien's instructions throughout the vignette on how to write a true war story. He makes countless claims on the lack of morals and humanity in a true war story; the second quote clearly demonstrates this significantly better. Another particularly dark death is that of Kiowa; the life of a noble man coming to an end in a field of defecation. After a nocturnal mortar strike, he sank into muck created from the wastes of the villagers, and was not found until well into the morning: “Mitchell Sanders finally nodded and said, ‘Let’s get it done,’ and they took hold of the legs and pulled up hard, then pulled again, and after a moment Kiowa came sliding to the surface. A piece of his shoulder was missing; the arms and face were cut up with shrapnel,” (O’Brien 167). This morbid description certainly has the capacity to make the reader’s stomach churn, just as Curt’s violent death is.
More importantly than this, though, is the question of whether or not either character deserved to die. Even though Curt was known for his shenanigans, he was still a boy, he was still human. O’Brien describes Lemon as being ignorant of the danger of the war as a, saying, “Right away, Lemon and Rat Kiley started goofing. They didn’t understand about the spookiness. They were kids; they just didn’t know,” (O’Brien 66). Lemon was simply a boy thrown into a war that didn’t make sense; he didn’t deserve to die. Kiowa certainly did not deserve his grim fate either. This was the same Kiowa who understood O’Brien’s dismay at murdering a man: “Then after a long empty time he said, ‘Take it slow. Just go wherever the spirit takes you,’” (120). This was the same Kiowa who showed disdain upon the abuse of a sacred place of the Vietnamese: “‘Setting up here. Its wrong. I don’t care what, it’s still a church,” (116). For such a respectable man to die in a pile of shit is not fair in anyway at all. Only a depraved person would make the claim that Kiowa, Lemon, or any of O’Brien’s other deceased characters deserved their twisted …show more content…
fates. Since O’Brien’s realistic characters die without true reason, the reader begins to wonder what the point of the war is.
The author uses metafiction to acknowledge this line of questioning, even going as far as to involve an entire vignette, “How to Tell a True War Story,” in attempting to answer it. The veteran discusses with the reader the point of war as portrayed in real war stories. In short, the answer is that, quite simply, there is none. As O’Brien states, “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest proper models of human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done,” (65). He clearly sees no higher calling in the battlefield; it is dark, pointless, and barbaric. No, it is more than barbaric: it is an ancient, archaic, and even eldritch practice. It is the practice that all animals on our planet engage in: natural selection, the ultimate test of who can survive. Fictional O’Brien himself, at one point, sought to reject it upon partaking in it first hand, writing, “He told me that it was a good kill, that I was a soldier and this was war, that I should shape up and stop staring and ask myself what the dead man would’ve done if things were reversed. None of it mattered,” (127). Kiowa tells O’Brien that it is kill or be killed, and the fictional O’Brien shuts down and cannot grasp it. However, the metafictional O’Brien speaking with his reader knows that it is vulgar, it is violent, it is crude: “As
a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil,” (65-66). In a more than secular sense, evil is anything that violates the most basic social contract, the law that one will not harm another, because the other will not harm him or her. War does not adhere to that law; moreover, it embraces the consequences of breaking the age old contract. War promotes violence and the basic reality of kill or be killed, pitting man against man. War is not poetic, and neither are its stories: “True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis,” (74). Natural selection is not abstract, once laid bare it does not require in depth analysis; it simply is. It is not generalized either; it is not a sweeping statement from a few specific cases, it is a law taken from every case. As O’Brien eloquently wrote, “You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end. Not then, not ever,” (72). Evolution has not come to a stop, and there is no sign of it ever doing so. War is just one of evolution’s many facades; violent conflict is just different from its other veils because it is so thin. After using metafiction to create dialogue with the reader, Tim O’Brien subsequently humanizes himself and his accompanying cast of characters in The Things They Carried to allow for the pointless tragedy of death to set in, tragically illustrating the idea that war is nothing more than man verses man in the never ending process of evolution. After O’Brien erases the line between himself and his character, he does the same for his other characters. The angst and dismay that the reader feels at their deaths gives O’Brien the ability to show the reader his grim realization about war. Metafictional elements in the text are imperative in O’Brien’s deliverance of the final, seemingly twisted blow. Not only do they paint O’Brien and his comrades in a human light, but they aid in his discussion about the lack of beautiful meaning in war. If he or she looks hard enough into O'Brien's collection of vignettes, the reader can see past their glorious preconceptions about war and see the truth that scarred the veteran into feeling such wretched emotions. It is the truth forbidden to be told by a soldier, and only understandable when told by a poet: war is merely natural selection en masse.
War as seen through the eyes of Ambrose Bierce in An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge depicts it as truly gritty. The author successfully sends a message of how death is a part of war, and it is not as noble or glorious as one would think it is. Due to popular media, we have this attitude that the protagonist is going to go down in a blaze of glory, and while it may be true for some, it is not like that for everyone. War is rough, dark, and gritty but no one ever wants to talk about those parts of war because it would ruin the fantasy of it.
G.K.Chesterton once quoted, “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” The novel Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden, recounts the struggles of a Canadian soldier through his tedious and terrible experiences fighting for his country against the Germans. Throughout the novel, the protagonist was disgusted by the blood and trauma war brings, however, he knew that it was imperative to kill, or else he would not have survived. In war, it is kill or be killed, someone who is wise will kill to survive and protect his country, as well as avenge his family or comrades.
Combat requires a certain emotional inertness. I am unable to kill something I empathize with as a human being. I need a reason to hate the enemy I am at war with; I need to be able to dehumanize the target. At first, as Caputo did, I would be unable to ignore the fact that the Vietcong are human beings with every right to live as I have. Following the brutal attempts to kill me, I will easily lose my own humanity as well as that of the enemy. It is the ethical wilderness that facilitates this dehumanizing transition. Once it is recognized that the enemy has dehumanized you, it is commonplace to return the favor.
The death of Kiowa is the point in this story, and arguably the entire novel, where the true nature of war becomes evident. His death in any situation would have been tragic, and camping in that “shit field” alone would have been an emotionally scarring experience; however, that these events had to coincide in time only multiplies the gravity of the situation. Interestingly, every soldier has his own way of grappling with such overwhelming feelings of grief for his highly-esteemed comrade. Yet what every man has in common is that in the end he concludes that he alone is the one ultimately responsible for Kiowa’s death.
Through his own experience, O’Brien develops the idea that self-respect erodes like a pebble in a river of insecurity. No matter how hard O’Brien tries to convince himself that he must listen to his conscience, he is unable to retreat from his burden. He might die in the wrong war! He might become one of the carcasses in the slaughterhouse! But he must do what he should do. In life when we believe that our self-respect is right, we are determined to follow our heart. However, when we encounter oppressive situations, we will not swim away from our insecurity, because “[we are] cowards, [we go] to war”.
The violent nature that the soldiers acquired during their tour in Vietnam is one of O'Brien's predominant themes in his novel. By consciously selecting very descriptive details that reveal the drastic change in manner within the men, O'Brien creates within the reader an understanding of the effects of war on its participants. One of the soldiers, "Norman Bowler, otherwise a very gentle person, carried a Thumb. . .The Thumb was dark brown, rubbery to touch. . . It had been cut from a VC corpse, a boy of fifteen or sixteen"(O'Brien 13). Bowler had been a very good-natured person in civilian life, yet war makes him into a very hard-mannered, emotionally devoid soldier, carrying about a severed finger as a trophy, proud of his kill. The transformation shown through Bowler is an excellent indicator of the psychological and emotional change that most of the soldiers undergo. To bring an innocent young man from sensitive to apathetic, from caring to hateful, requires a great force; the war provides this force. However, frequently are the changes more drastic. A soldier named "Ted Lavender adopted an orphaned puppy. . .Azar strapped it to a Claymore antipersonnel mine and squeezed the firing device"(O'Brien 39). Azar has become demented; to kill a puppy that someone else has adopted is horrible. However, the infliction of violence has become the norm of behavior for these men; the fleeting moment of compassion shown by one man is instantly erased by another, setting order back within the group. O'Brien here shows a hint of sensitivity among the men to set up a startling contrast between the past and the present for these men. The effect produced on the reader by this contrast is one of horror; therefore fulfilling O'Brien's purpose, to convince the reader of war's severely negative effects.
Between sacrifice and success, sacrifice contributes more to heroism. A hero is someone who would be willing to sacrifice almost anything for something greater. Heros also show great courage, leadership, and sometimes other qualities. Usually, a hero will sacrifice themselves to protect other people, displaying that they are caring. Being a hero can be defined or seen in several ways, but sacrifice is still important to heroism.
The deceitful interpretation presented in "How to tell a true war story", is an example of Historicism. Today, people hear about the vietnam war through family members, friends and veterans. When people tell war stories they try to make themselves seem victorious. It makes the person listening feel as if it was all in the good of the people by killing people. O'Brian somehow justifies a point in his book by stating, "A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encouraged virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done." In actual reality more harm was done than good. People were forced off of their lands to hide in safety and the economic consequence is fatal. To derive to the point, O' Brian is saying there is no real war story if the audience feels that killing people had made a big and better consequence. To look back upon the Vietnam war it brought Vietnam to it's knees. The Americans assisted someone who asked them not to interfere and in the end there was no winner. The Americans had nothing to gain by fighting this war. The title was a contridictary of how to tell a true war story.
When O'Brien says that a true war story is not about war he means that a war story is not about death, fighting or war, it is about the soldiers grim experiences. O’Brien writes “A true war story in never about war… It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow” (62). The quote demonstrates that O'Brien's definition of a war story does not describe what happens but it describes the feelings and emotions that were felt because of what happened. A true war story does not focus on what happened but it should focus on the pain that the soldiers felt.
In the end, it is clear that Heller is commenting on the evil that comes out of war. Not only because of the violence, but because of all the things wrong with the way they are established and positioned. There is a myriad of pointless constitutions in the military that result in even more death and disaster. Ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen is stationed to dig up holes and fill that back up continuously, and he is accepting of this roll because he states that it is part of the war effort, when it obviously has nothing to do with winning the war in any way possible. This is just an example of the senselessness war invokes as there are situations when men find themselves not fighting to win the war, because the war is close to being ended, but instead to save their lives. And as a result, the true flaws of society come out. Heller emphasizes the unjust bureaucracy of the military, the greed and selfishness of man, and the corruption in religion through many different characters who emphasize what is wrong by making it seem right, creating a deeply affective and wonderfully entertaining satire.
One of the more remarkable counterpoints of Kien/Boa Ninh's war experience is his view of American soldiers. For him, they were horrific, powerful, and inhuman. To American soldiers, the war was a journey into a strange world where snipers hid behind every bush. North Vietnamese soldiers had already fought for fifteen years and seen the country ripped apart. Now they were to go up against hundreds of thousands of fresh troops from the world's technological superpower. A little more frightening. This historical aspect is reflected in the text. For Bao Ninh, the enemy was not always a man that could only kill other men. "The diamond-shaped grass clearing was piled high with bodies killed by helicopter gunships. Broken bodies, bodies blown apart, bodies vaporized." (Ninh, 5) How...
He states, "The myth of war is essential to justify the horrible sacrifices required in war, the destruction and death of innocents. It can be formed only by denying the reality of war, by turning the lies, the manipulation, the inhumanness of war into the heroic ideal" (26). Chris Hedges tries to get the point across that in war nothing is as it seems.... ... middle of paper ...
O’Brien has many characters in his book, some change throughout the book and others +are introduced briefly and change dramatically during their time in war and the transition to back home after the war. The way the characters change emphasises the effect of war on the body and the mind. The things the boys have to do in the act of war and “the things men did or felt they had to do” 24 conflict with their morals burning the meaning of their morals with the duties they to carry out blindly. The war tears away the young’s innocence, “where a boy in a man 's body is forced to become an adult” before he is ready; with abrupt definiteness that no one could even comprehend and to fully recover from that is impossible.
Behind every war there is supposed to be a moral—some reason for fighting. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. O’Brien relays to the readers the truth of the Vietnam War through the graphic descriptions of the man that he killed. After killing the man O’Brien was supposed to feel relief, even victory, but instead he feels grief of killing a man that was not what he had expected. O’Brien is supposed to be the winner, but ends up feeling like the loser. Ironically, the moral or lesson in The Things They Carried is that there is no morality in war. War is vague and illogical because it forces humans into extreme situations that have no obvious solutions.
In one of the early chapters, “How To Tell A True War Story”, O’Brien recalled the time Lemon and Kiley went off by themselves after the platoon marched for two days, “A nature hike, [Rat Kiley and Curt Lemon] thought…giggling and calling each other yellow mother and playing a silly game they invented” (69). Kiley is momentarily portrayed as a kid, who is untouched by the harsh realities of the Vietnam War. But the juxtaposition of placing an unsuspecting child in a hostile war zone sets an ominous tone for Rat Kiley. Like most soldiers who had been drafted into the war, Kiley initially did not have the emotional During his deployment in Vietnam, Kiley experienced the dark elements of the war, indubitably changing his perspective of the war and him as a person-- from the deaths of his fellow soldiers to the unresolved issues, nightmares, and detachment from reality. What is left of Kiley is only a